The Confession

by James E. McGreevey

  But I never stopped campaigning for governor. The papers remarked that my first press conference after losing the ’97 race “sounded like a campaign speech,” and they were right. I never even slowed down. My months were packed with speeches to Holocaust survivors, visits to churches and synagogues, dinners at VFW halls and labor events, gala fundraisers, and private meetings at diners with the bosses and warlords.

  My first goal was to lock up the ballot lines as early as possible, to foreclose the need for a primary so that I could devote my energies to the general election. So I courted each of the county chairmen constantly, starting with Hudson County’s Bob Janiszewski, who had gone against me last time. I dropped by his home fully nineteen months ahead of schedule to tell him how much his support would mean to me.

  He invited me to stay for breakfast. Stroking the head of his ferocious-looking Doberman pinscher, he asked about my plans for state government and spoke expansively about the kinds of support he could deliver to the right candidate.

  I appreciated his candor. But I told him all I needed was his endorsement on the party line. I had won Hudson last time out, and I was sure I’d win it again. What I was looking for was momentum. If I had Janiszewski’s backing this early, it could help me convince other bosses who opposed me four years ago.

  No matter what I said, though, I couldn’t get Janiszewski to commit. So I went to ask Paul Byrne, his political operative and best friend since First Holy Communion, for his blessing. Instead of answering me, he regaled me with a long story about his own fiftieth birthday party. It seemed his friends had bought him a ticket to the Dominican Republic, where they’d rented an entire whorehouse for his exclusive pleasures.

  “Jimmy? I felt like a six-year-old kid in a Dunkin’ Donuts,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t eat them all, but I sure as shit had fun thinking about it!”

  A few weeks later, Bob Janiszewski called and gave me Hudson, just like that. I never found out what turned him around.

  But it wasn’t long before everybody in New Jersey learned that Janiszewski was a man in trouble. He pleaded guilty to taking more than $100,000 in kickbacks from vendors and went away for forty-one months. His greed, it turned out, was bigger than all of Hudson County.

  I was disappointed, but not surprised. I’d been in state politics long enough to know it was a game for saints and scoundrels. But deep in his indictment papers was another startling revelation. Long before his arrest had become public, he had turned state’s evidence and started taping conversations with other New Jersey politicians and contractors—even Paul Byrne, perhaps his oldest friend in the world. A surprising number of them fell into his trap. One of the cardinal rules of New Jersey politics is, there’s no such thing as a private conversation. Governor Byrne once told me this, as though imparting a philosophical truth from the ages. “Somewhere along the line,” he said, “you are going to be taped by someone wearing a wire.” This is why so many political meetings start with a big bear hug—a New Jersey pat down among friends.

  But Janiszewski outsmarted everyone. He had hidden the recorder in his dog’s collar. I have no idea if he tried to catch me saying something inappropriate that morning, but nothing ever came of it.

  DINA HAD ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE PARIS, BUT I COULD NEVER AFFORD that for us. So on the second week of February 2000, we compromised and headed for Montreal by car, a six-hour drive. It was going to be our first real vacation together.

  Somewhere north of Albany, in the Adirondack Mountains, Dina took the wheel and I lowered the back of my seat for a nap. I was in a half-dream state, excited about seeing the sites of my grandparents’ pilgrimages. I was planning to propose to Dina there; in my pocket I had a diamond ring, a simple stone in a tasteful gold setting. I was hoping she wouldn’t find it too understated.

  When I felt the car jerk into a spin, I snapped my eyes open. Dina had hit a patch of black ice and we were whipping around at top speed on the Adirondack Northway. An eighteen-wheeler was bearing down on us. I grabbed the steering wheel and pulled the car hard to one side, avoiding the truck but sending us crashing into the guardrail. Luckily, we came to a stop there. We could have flipped over or bounced back into traffic. Neither of us was hurt, but we were badly shaken.

  We had no idea where we were. Our cell phones didn’t work. Taking the wheel, I was able to get the car back onto the Northway, but the back wheels had been knocked out of alignment, and it was nearly impossible to keep the car heading forward. Loose pieces of twisted metal were dragging behind us, sending a curtain of sparks in our wake. We lurched to the next exit and found a gas station located near the bottom of the ramp. The attendant agreed to have a look at the car in the morning, and at his suggestion we called a bar in the nearest village to find a place to stay. They had one room available; we agreed to take it sight unseen.

  I can’t recall the name of the village, but I’ll never forget it: down on the heels and shut tight for the winter. The owner sent somebody to pick us up—a patron, judging by the perfume of gin on his breath and his tendency to drive with one eye closed. He got us back to town by the grace of God. Our room was cold and had two twin beds, but we didn’t mind squeezing into one of them. Being alive and warm was enough. (Even better was the sight of our old friend Congressman Bob Menendez when we turned on the TV, speaking on the floor of the House.)

  The next morning, we wandered through the desolate mountain village until we found a place serving breakfast. We both ordered the blueberry pancakes, and they were the best things we’d ever tasted. The other patrons were fun and welcoming—one turned out to be distantly related to my friend Ed McKenna, the mayor of Red Bank, New Jersey.

  Despite our close call, we were starting to enjoy ourselves. “Let’s go shopping!” Dina called out playfully.

  “Deen,” I said, “we’re in the middle of nowhere! Did you see a place to shop?”

  One of the restaurant owners chimed in with a few stores we’d missed, tucked away on side streets. So we headed out, ready for adventure, and spent the day ducking in and out of doorways and meeting kind and fascinating people. It may have been a first for me, having a whole day ahead of me with no obligations. It had taken me a near disaster to experience something so simple.

  We stayed in the village about thirty-six hours before the mechanic told us it would be another week before our car was ready. So we hopped on a train and continued on to Montreal without it. The accommodations there—at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel on Rene Levesque Boulevard—were luxurious, but hardly superior to our twin bed over the bar.

  Valentine’s Day fell on our second night in the French quarter. After we’d enjoyed another outstanding meal, I reached for the ring in my pocket. “We never made it to Paris,” I said. “We barely even made it to Montreal. It takes a special person to handle the challenges and the difficulties of the career I’ve chosen. In a way, this trip is almost an allegory for our relationship. Whatever life throws at us, Deen, if we’re together we’ll be able to handle it. I’m asking you to share this journey with me, to bear its ups and downs. I’d be blessed if you’ll be my wife.”

  I slid the ring on Dina’s finger, as tears rolled off her cheeks. She never looked more beautiful than she did that night.

  THREE WEEKS LATER, I HEADED FOR ISRAEL, PART OF A DELEGATION of 750 elected officials, politicians, and cultural leaders organized by the United Jewish Federation of MetroWest, which covers Essex, Morris, Union, and Sussex counties. I’d been there twice before on political junkets. This trip, called Mission 2000, was billed by the agency as a chance for us to meet donors and open our eyes to Israel’s significance in world affairs. Among us were Jon Corzine, at the time making his successful run for the Senate, and his Republican challenger, Jim Treffinger, the Essex County Republican executive, as well as Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen, state Senate President Donald DiFrancesco, and mayors and party loyalists from both sides of the aisle.

  Our schedule was full. We visited the Knesset, traveled to the Ol
d City in Jerusalem, met farmers in the Negev Desert, and lunched with officials from then–prime minister Ehud Barak’s office. The trip’s organizers thoughtfully accommodated Roman Catholics on Ash Wednesday with a side trip to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, built by Constantine the Great in the year 335. We visited the Golan Heights, over which Israel’s dominion is contested; Modi’in, a large city where we helped plant cypress trees to symbolize our solidarity; and a West Bank settlement called Ofakim—“New Horizon” in Hebrew—where students performed a musical for us.

  The settlements, built on land Israel won in war in 1967, were a topic of conversation and controversy among us. Over lunch one day, I had a chance to talk to Yitzhak Rabin about them. He advocated withdrawing the settlers from the Golan Heights. “It costs forty-five thousand dollars a year to protect each settler,” he told me. “And for what? There’s no economic return. It’s not an investment. I’d rather be investing in irrigation systems and farms in the Negev, because that’s an investment in Israel’s future.” I was surprised at how clear, straightforward, and objective his argument was—in a part of the world defined by centuries of emotion.

  One afternoon, we took a bus trip to a local arts center in Rishon Lezion, a sprawling but rather featureless city just five miles outside Tel Aviv. We were greeted there by the mayor, but it was his thirty-two-year-old communications director who caught my eye. That’s too casual a way to put it. My attraction to him was immediate and intense, and apparently reciprocated. From the minute I walked into the building, I felt it. Our eyes met over and over before we were introduced. “This is Golan Cipel,” he said. “He is familiar with New Jersey—for a number of years he worked at the Israel embassy in Manhattan.”

  We shook hands for a long time. “I followed your campaign very closely,” Golan said. “Twenty-seven thousand votes is a very narrow margin.” He went on to describe my strengths among various constituencies, remarking how well I’d done among white men—a rarity for Democrats, as he well knew.

  “You would have won with better outreach to Orthodox Jews,” he added.

  I was startled by his knowledge of my campaign. We talked through the length of the reception, and his insights were dead-on. At lunch I made sure to sit next to him. “Democrats take Jews for granted. It’s a powerful constituency. With Orthodox, you pick up Jewish Republicans, so actually you pick up two votes instead of one. You have to develop relationships with them,” he said. “You’ve got a good record on Israel. Your efforts on Holocaust education are strong. More people need to know that. In 1997, you got a good percentage of the overall Jewish vote. But if you’d gotten even a small number of Orthodox votes, and all of the Reform Jews, you would be governor today.”

  He had smart ideas about my current campaign, but I admit I was only half listening. Watching this handsome man talk—and show an interest in my political standing—totally mesmerized me. Nobody commits to memory the demographic standings of a politician halfway around the world as an academic exercise. I was flattered beyond anything I’d ever experienced before. From there our conversation moved naturally to the personal, and we talked about our lives and goals and dreams.

  I assumed he was straight, but what was happening at this lunch if not flirting? I flirted back, a bit shamelessly. But he matched me compliment for compliment. I can’t say I ever had a more electrifying first meeting—so dangerously carried out in a room full of politicians who could ruin us both. I fell hard.

  Immediately afterward I went to the junket organizers and requested to be seated next to Golan again at dinner. Years later, one of them was quoted saying he knew exactly what was going on. “They couldn’t take their eyes off one another,” he said.

  RIGHT OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL, GOLAN HAD SERVED FIVE YEARS with the navy of the Israeli Defense Force, part of his country’s compulsory military service, and another ten years in the reserves. That explains a lot about his straight-backed comportment and his black-and-white world view. He was graduated from New York Institute of Technology, where he also earned a master’s in communication. He had never married, and at least on our first meetings he didn’t mention a girlfriend. He wasn’t quick with such personal details. Rather, he spoke with passion about his career in politics. Besides his stint at the consular office in New York, he had clocked some time as an aide in the Knesset, at a job that seemed similar to mine at the assembly, marking up bills and researching issues. He’d landed a big job with the mayor of Rishon Lezion, a city of over 200,000; Meir Nitzan was almost like a father figure to Golan.

  But the job was just a stepping stone, he admitted to me at dinner that night. Having seen and experienced so much in his young life, he had a wanderlust he wanted to quench.

  Impulsively, I invited him to join my campaign. He said he was thrilled at the chance.

  BY JUNE 2000, I’D RAISED $9 MILLION, MORE THAN I’D SPENT IN my first run for governor, and well on the way to my goal of $40 million for the whole campaign. I say that as though this was easy, but the opposite was true. Unless you’re a Clinton or a Bush, $40 million is an obscene amount to pull out of pockets. By way of comparison, that’s two-thirds the annual budget for Woodbridge, a bustling middle-class city of 100,000 tax-paying citizens. I was having to attend six and seven fundraising events every single day. Most of the time I had no idea where I was or who I was talking to. In the car between events, staff members would brief me hurriedly on the attendees, their histories and connections—just enough for me to parrot a few lines of familiarity on my way through the room before dashing on to the next event.

  We decided against setting up a finance committee with a powerful chairman. Given the enormous egos in New Jersey, anyone we anointed would surely offend a powerful segment of potential funders. So instead we set up numerous finance committees, each one organized around a policy area: infrastructure, development, business, and so on. When we invited people to take part, we asked for maximum allowable contributions. “These are investments,” we said, “in a very sound political calculus.” We were that sure we would win.

  By now, I knew that you can’t take large sums of money from people without making them specific and personal promises in return. In our campaign, people weren’t shy about saying what they expected for their “investments.” An unusually large number wanted powerful postings—board appointments to the Sports Authority or the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, for example, which were coveted not just for their prestige but because they offered control over tremendously potent economic engines, with discretionary budgets in the tens of millions. The plum was the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; directors there controlled a multi-billion-dollar budget and helped direct development projects that determined the geographic landscape of the East Coast. It was amazing to me how many people openly and aggressively lobbied for this job.

  I tried to stay as naïve about this horse trading as possible. I allowed my staff to intimate things to donors, and I know John Lynch and the other bosses were doing the same thing. It would be a felony for any of us to promise a posting in exchange for a contribution. But we’d long since learned to walk this side of a dangerous line.

  Often I’d be called in to seal a deal before a check was written. Invariably, the contributor would tell me how much it would mean for him to be appointed to the Port Authority.

  “I know New Jersey would benefit from your public service, wherever you give it,” I might reply. If pressed, I would add, “What is your vision for the Port Authority?”

  Too often their answers said more about their quest for power than concern for our state’s future. Sometimes they spoke of having achieved financial security in their lives, freeing them to pursue a new passion or challenge.

  “Thank you for letting us consider you,” I’d say.

  For an influential executive who was about to hand over $100,000, that often wasn’t enough. “Will you consider me for the Port Authority?” he was likely to push.

  My standard
reply was, “You’d be great in a number of positions.”

  “Will Port Authority be one of them?”

  This is the daredevil’s dance every politician faces, from the biggest campaigns to the least significant. It is why fundraising is so corrosive and why campaign finance reform is so necessary. There has to be a better way to further democracy without exposing the naked ambitions of politicians to the power-lust and greed of political donors, a volatile combination. Any politician who wants high office as urgently as I did is the weaker partner in this negotiation.

  My responses were always governed by a trio of concerns, all in constant tension with one another: legal, ethical, and financial. The law was always my bottom line; what I said was always determined by what could be done legally. Remembering Governor Byrne’s warnings about body wires, I consciously avoided saying anything that might be construed as an illegal quid pro quo.

  But in order to get the money I needed I gave myself a lot more leeway when it came to ethics. I made a threshold decision to stay out of the weeds of fundraising, and let others cut deals on my behalf. I didn’t monitor things closely enough. Part of me—the purely ambitious part of me—didn’t care enough.

  I was running for office for all the right reasons. I wanted to help bring about decency, justice, and compassion for working families and those who had no voice in the halls of Trenton. But I couldn’t do any of that without getting elected; at least that’s what I told myself. That doesn’t exonerate me for my shortcuts. I was becoming too adept and too clever at making these accommodations. Increasingly, this James E. McGreevey, this political construct, was looking like a stranger to me.

  I DIDN’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT A DIVISIVE PRIMARY THIS TIME out. The whole state Democratic machine was in my camp. For safety’s sake, Ray Lesniak organized a dinner of the warlords at a loft he kept in New York’s Tribeca. Senators Jon Corzine and Bob Torricelli, the state’s ranking Democrats, were both there, and both pledged their support. I’d secretly worried that Torricelli wanted to run for the job himself—he’d hinted at it in past campaigns, and if our party regained power in Trenton that fall, the work of a Democratic chief executive could be very rewarding. So I was relieved to hear him say he had no ambitions for the job.